What to put in your Google Business Profile, and what to leave out

Your Google listing is probably the most-read page about your business, and it is almost certainly the one you have spent the least time on. Most people who look you up never reach your website at all. They see the box on the right of the search results, or the pin on the map, and they decide from that.

It takes about twenty minutes to fill in properly. The trouble is that the form asks for forty things and gives you no sense of which two actually matter, so most owners fill in the obvious fields, get bored around the middle, and leave the rest.

The three fields that carry almost all the weight

If you do nothing else, do these.

Your category. This is the single most powerful field on the whole listing, because it decides which searches you can appear in at all. Google won't show a business filed under "handyman" to somebody searching for an electrician. Pick the most specific one that genuinely fits — not the broadest, which is the instinct. You can add a few secondary categories underneath, and you should, but the main one does the heavy lifting.

Your hours, including the awkward ones. Wrong hours are worse than no hours, because somebody turns up to a closed door and leaves a review about it. Put in bank holidays. Put in the week you close at Christmas. If you work from a van and there is no door to knock on, say so in the description rather than pretending to have shop hours.

Your service area, if you go to customers. A listing with a pin and no area tells Google to show you to people standing near the pin. If you travel forty minutes in every direction, that is forty minutes of customers who never see you. Google's own guidelines for representing your business set out how service areas work, including the rule that you list the places you actually serve rather than every town you would like to.

Everything else on the listing is worth having. None of it will save you if one of those three is wrong.

What to leave out, and why

The form is generous and that is the problem. There is a temptation to fill every box, and some of those boxes cost you.

Don't list a town you don't really cover. It looks free, and it isn't: you get calls you turn down, which wastes your morning, and occasionally a review from somebody annoyed that you wouldn't come. Cover what you cover.

Don't stuff keywords into your business name. "Dave's Plumbing" is your name. "Dave's Plumbing — Emergency Plumber Manchester 24/7 Boiler Repair" is not, and it breaks Google's rules clearly enough that competitors report it and it gets changed back. The short-term lift isn't worth having your listing suspended.

Don't publish your home address if you work from home. Once it is on the map it is on the map, and you will have a hard time getting it off. Set yourself up as a business that travels to customers instead — the option exists precisely for this.

And don't fill the description with the words you think people search for. There's a section on that below, because it's the field owners get wrong most often.

The attributes are small and quietly effective

Somewhere in the settings there is a long list of yes or no options: wheelchair access, free parking, appointment needed, women-led, whether you offer online estimates.

They look like box-ticking. In practice they answer real questions people have before they get in touch, and several of them show up directly in search as little labels. If somebody filters for a place with step-free access, or scans for whether they can park, having ticked the box is the difference between appearing and not.

Go through the whole list once. It takes ten minutes and you will never have to do it again unless something changes.

The questions section is public and it is not really yours

There is a questions and answers box on your listing. Anybody can ask a question there, and — this is the part that surprises people — anybody can answer it. Including strangers who have never used your business.

Wrong answers from random people sit there looking official. The fix is simple and takes fifteen minutes: post the ten questions you get asked most, and answer them yourself. That's allowed and encouraged. Do it before somebody else does.

Which questions? Not the ones you wish people asked. The ones you actually say out loud every week. Do you charge for a quote. How far do you travel. Can you come at the weekend. Do you take card. What's the smallest job you'll do.

The same answers need to live somewhere you own

Filling in the listing is worth doing, and it has a ceiling. You are answering Google's questions in Google's boxes, in the order Google chose, and everything that doesn't fit one of those boxes goes unsaid.

That leftover set is usually the stuff that decides the job. What happens if the work turns out bigger once you open the wall. Whether you'll take on a property that old. Whether there's a call-out charge before anybody touches anything. It lives in your head and gets explained down the phone, differently each time.

That is the gap we built hailera for: you write those answers once, check them yourself, and publish them as an agent, so your own site and the AI apps people increasingly ask can read them straight rather than guessing from an old page. A plainly written page on your website does a lot of the same job for nothing, though, so if you haven't got one of those yet, that is the cheaper thing to write first.

Then leave it alone, mostly

Once it's right, a Google listing needs very little. Check the hours before a bank holiday. Add a photo when you finish something you're proud of. Answer reviews. That's genuinely it.

The one thing worth doing more than once is looking at your own listing signed out, on a phone, roughly every three months. Things change without you: Google occasionally updates details from other sources, and members of the public can suggest edits to your address and hours. Most owners have no idea this happens until somebody rings the wrong number.

Today: open your listing on your phone, signed out, and check three things — the main category, this week's hours, and whether your service area matches where you actually go.

Sources

• Guidelines for representing your business on Google — Google Business Profile Help

Written by the team at hailera — we help small businesses answer customer questions without being there.